“This is the kind of house that’s a joy to sell,” says estate agent Rob Assi, valuing a neat and stylish two-bedroom home in Golcar, a village three miles west of Huddersfield. He gestured to the tasteful wallpaper and fashionable furniture. “It’s what we call modern contemporary. Some [buyers] can’t see past the decor, so properties like this tend to sell very easily.”
Anna Potocki and Toni Haigh were first-time buyers when they bought the house (which they share with their black cat Moonshine), but after more than 12 years of living there, they’ve outgrown it. They paid £127,000 in 2011 for their home, which benefits from good schools and transport links, and Assi estimates it will sell for between £190,000 and £200,000 this year.
It might prove to be an example of Huddersfield’s remarkable house price boom, after the lender Halifax found that house prices in the West Yorkshire town grew faster than anywhere else in the UK in the 12 months to October 2023, up 8.7%.
Huddersfield only just beat neighbouring Bradford, also in West Yorkshire, to the top spot, where prices climbed 8.5%, followed by Falkirk in Scotland at 6%.
At the other end of the scale was Stoke-on-Trent in the West Midlands, where prices fell 15% year-on-year, followed by Perth in Scotland at 14.1%, the building society found.
The aftermath of the pandemic could be one reason behind the split. In Huddersfield, it created a noticeable uplift in the market, says Assi, with the combined effect of a sense of claustrophobia among those living in nearby big cities encouraging them into greener spaces and factors such as the stamp duty holiday, which gave a push especially to those who wanted to upgrade to a more expensive home.
“The effect was that above asking price sales became more normal,” he says. “Very sought after properties were getting up to 30 [offers] and sellers felt like they could be cheeky and ask for a bit more. Lots of people were paying over the odds.”
This “freak event” disappeared as quickly as it arrived when the local market slumped in 2021, mirroring the national trend as potential buyers were put off by interest rates which began to rise at the end of that year. But some of the uplift has lasted, with Huddersfield’s average property price rising by about £22,000 last year from £253,000 in October 2022 to £275,000 a year later.
Darren Harley, sales manager for the house builder Harron Homes, says people were discovering that Huddersfield was “good value for money”.
The town sits in a green triangle between the metropolitan centres of Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield. The train links are in theory enviable – though beset with the usual northern delays and cancellations – with Leeds only 20 minutes away and Manchester 30 minutes away. The journey to Manchester airport is one hour on a direct train.
“If you want great nightlife, you’ve got it locally. If you want peace and quiet and countryside and country walks you’ve got it nearby.
“If you want local country pubs and a roaring fire, you can go to those places but if you want haute cuisine and really high-quality food where you’re going to get dressed up to go out every night then you’ve got that as well,” Harley said.
In Golcar, while Potocki is a teaching assistant at a local primary school, Haigh’s office is in nearby Leeds, where he worked full-time before the pandemic for an oil and gas company. Now, like many UK workers, he does three days in the office and two at home, working from the kitchen table. Having the space for a home office is one of the reasons behind the move, something that is becoming typical here, as workers settle into the new hybrid working norm.
Martin Thornton, founder and managing director of Huddersfield-based Martin Thornton Estate Agents, says the scale of homeworking was “a new thing to Huddersfield” as people from Manchester and Leeds move further out.
“But they’re not just buying any old house in Huddersfield. They’re quite specific about where they’re buying,” he said, referring to rugged hills and cosy villages on the outskirts of the town, such as Holmfirth – the setting of the BBC comedy Last of the Summer Wine – and Slaithwaite (pronounced sla-wit), the picturesque filming location for ITV’s Where the Heart Is.
“The town centre at the moment is not that popular but they are in the middle of pumping a lot of money into it, which, for Huddersfield, it’ll be a big investment,” he says.
Spades are already in the ground for £1bn worth of both public and private spending on the town centre, which includes a £250m redevelopment involving a town park, museum and art gallery, library, food court and music venue. A total of £43m will see a former college site turned into a shopping centre, while £250m is being spent on six new buildings at Huddersfield University, £20m on a bus station revamp and a further £20m on the renovation of the Grade II-listed George Hotel. The town is also set to benefit from much-needed rail upgrades in its borough, Kirklees, to the tune of £1.5bn.
It is also possible that the property market in Huddersfield, a former grand Victorian textile hub and birth place of Harold Wilson, is capturing a broader sense of optimism in West Yorkshire. A recent analysis found that Leeds is the place with the highest advertised salaries outside London, and Bradford, less than 15 miles to the north of Huddersfield, will be City of Culture in 2025. Meanwhile neighbouring Calderdale is holding a year of culture this year, following Leeds’s similar festival in 2023.
But Thornton is sceptical that Halifax’s report was fully reflective of Huddersfield’s real market conditions, particularly over the last six months.
“If you went on Rightmove and looked at the last seven days’ activity, you’d probably find half a dozen new instructions and 20 reductions,” he says.
An absence of buyers is palpable, while the rental market is saturated with those looking for a rented home – for now – to the point where it’s “absolutely unbelievable”.
“You don’t go from a record shortage of houses 18 months ago, into a situation where nobody wants to move,” Thornton says.
“We’ve got lots of people that want to move, they just need some confidence in the interest rates, the banks, that things are going to level out and once they do, I think we’ll be fine.”
